Nazi Germany: Society, Culture and Politics

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Nazi Germany provides a comprehensive historical survey of the subject which artfully balances social and cultural history with the more common political and military history of the regime. It unravels the complexities of the daily lives led by perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and those whose position on this spectrum is unclear. The book offers a distinctly transnational narrative of events in Germany from 1933 to 1945. It reveals the latest insights about the Third Reich, prompting you to think about important historical and ethical questions that attend this period of history. Pamela E. Swett and S. Jonathan Wiesen address: * The movements ideological origins * National Socialisms rise in the 1920s * The creation of a police state * Nazi consolidation of political power at national and regional levels * Regime attempts to reshape German society along ideological lines By invoking the concepts of peoples community and racial community, Swett and Wiesen explore the unique violence and racism of the Nazis, but they also examine how Germany tried to present itself as a normal state, and how it engaged with political models and racial practices in other countries. Discussions of Hitlers foreign policy and economic triumphs, their propagandistic uses, social and cultural changes, and the relationship of Germans to their Fhrer then lead to a focus on the military and home fronts of the Second World War, and finally on to Germanys eventual defeat. Through exposure to the voices of contemporaries, you will be prompted to consider key questions: How did German democracy give way to a brutal dictatorship so quickly What was daily life like for average Germans and those labeled as biological and political outsiders Why did the Nazi dictatorship embark on a destructive war that led to the death of tens of millions of Europeans and to the demise of a political order that had become exceedingly popular by 1939

Author Bio

Pamela E. Swett is Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research (Humanities) at McMaster University, Canada. She is the author of Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Weimar Berlin, 1929-1933(2004) and Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (2014). She is also the co-editor, along with S. Jonathan Wiesen and Jonathan Zatlin, of Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (2007), as well as Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany (2011), alongside Corey Ross. S. Jonathan Wiesen is Professor of History, Department Chair, and Distinguished Teacher at Southern Illinois University, USA. He is the author of West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (2001), which won the Hagley Prize in Business History, and Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (2011). He is also the co-editor, along with Pamela Swett and Jonathan Zatlin, of Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (2007). Beginning in 2017, Wiesen and Swett co-edited the Nazi era chapters of the German Historical Institutes Historical Documents and Images online portal, for which they added hundreds of new documents, maps, tables, sound clips, still images, and moving images.